Gone are the days of weird dubs and voiceovers that didn’t match the character’s facial expressions. Not to mention the lip-sync problems, dubs, and voiceovers to another language just didn’t feel right. Especially when you compared them to the original performance. Most foreign films that have been English dubbed sound really funny at times and the same can be said for English films that get their own voiceovers in other languages.
But we live in the world of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, so nothing is impossible. New AI has been developed that could revolutionize how the voice-over industry works. New deepfake technology is reportedly in the works that can dub films with voiceovers almost close to the original. The new technology is based on artificial intelligence and is developed by Flawless, a UK-based company.
Flawless has been co-founded by director Scott Mann. Mann told reporters that he made the company because he was just about fed with the poor dubbing of films and foreign films. The new technology can reduce lip-sync problems drastically. Mann told reporters about his reasons, saying that “I remember just being devastated. You make a small change in a word or a performance, it can have a large change on a character in the story beat, and in turn on the film”.
Keeping in line with the company’s name, Mann wants to create dubbings that are near flawless and in line with the original performance. He said that “It’s going to be invisible pretty soon. People will be watching something and they won’t realize it was originally shot in French or whatever”. A quick look at the company’s website flawlessai shows us an inspirational real of how the final product from the tech looks like.
Mann has been working with Christian Theobalt, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. Together they’re striving to achieve perfection in their translations and refine the technology further. They could even use deepfake tech to get the characters to say completely different lines whilst keeping the li[-sync in check.
The potential of deepfake technology is kind of scary, given that you could change a picture or video into almost anything you want. Some reports suggested that AI and deepfakes could cause disruptive effects on society. Some experts even claimed that the technology was part of a long history of media manipulation.
You could basically make videos of people saying something that they would never say. Some people could abuse the technology and spread such videos on social media that could then promote propaganda or other agendas.